[timdown]

The good side of David Mark: I have read plenty of his stuff on comp.lang.javascript over some time, and my own JavaScript is good enough to tell that his understanding is deep and his code intelligent and thorough. I would say his knowledge of the DOM and how to code for it is significantly deeper than John Resig's, lending weight to his criticisms. He has been working on Dojo and I am certain his input will improve it significantly.

The bad side: he consistently antagonises people, has what seems to be a personal vendetta against jQuery and declines to publish useful, constructive critiques, instead posting ill-formatted, snide rants dressed up as code reviews on comp.lang.javascript. His behaviour towards John Resig has resulted in Resig claiming to have turned his back entirely on comp.lang.javascript, which is great shame because I think there is a lot he could learn there to improve jQuery. If David Mark's attacks are turning people away from comp.lang.javascript, then that is unfortunate because he is by no means the only expert on there and others experts on there will have less of an audience for their insightful posts.

[boucher]

There are so many better outlets, anyone who's feeling trapped on comp.lang.javascript should just go somewhere else.

I think it's a bold claim to say that David's understanding of the DOM is "significantly deeper" than John's. Especially considering that the DOM is not a particularly complex set of APIs.

One can only hope that he does actually improve Dojo, instead of destroy their community or credibility with his rants.